Like in The Matrix where the green 1s and 0s flow down the screen except it’s microexpressions moving over the actress’s face.

Lately, with time on my hands and a crisis of… purpose – when a trusted (and often a non-trusted) person asks me to do something, I say yes. When they send me a link to apply to something, I apply.

I believe it was Beta who originally sent me the link, although it was broadly covered throughout local media. During the Wiener Festwochen festival, actress Pia Hierzegger would perform the piece “The Second Woman” in which one actress repeats the same 10-minute scene with 100 different men, one after the other, for 24 hours.

Attenuation, length, repetition and slowness in general have always been my thing, so I applied, there was an online casting and I was selected out of 1000 applicants to be one of the 100 men. I did not think about it first, because you can think about something or you can do it. Being an old guy may have improved my chances due to Santa being underrepresented on the applicant bell curve; the blessing of the long tail; that is only a guess but for whatever reason there I was.

Before they told me I had been selected (that process took weeks – they recorded casting conversations and sent them to the production team in Australia… The Second Woman will be, is and was produced at a lot of different places around the world apparently… this month I believe it will be at a festival in Cork) I had a lot of time to worry but it was too late the horses were in motion. The milk was out of the barn.

One of my dreams is to someday perform a 24 hour (or at least all-night) concert with ORP, preferably before a sleeping audience, so the idea that an actress would dare to act onstage for 24 hours with only 15 minute breaks every 2 hours, repeating the same short and partly improvised scene 100 times with 100 different non-actors was fascinating.

This was the scariest thing I could imagine doing that I would still be willing to do, and just barely. The event horizon of scary action. Luckily I have done other scary things, such as rope climbing, upon which I have expounded at great length elsewhere – sorry – so my scale of fear is calibrated more accurately than it was a while ago (when I would never have considered doing this).

Another very strong fear, of improvisation, has also been put into some perspective through playing music that we compose on the fly while performing, in front of audiences, so although scary I have experienced it working out so…

But a fear of speaking before an audience remained. As did a fear of being unprepared (there were no rehearsals). As did a fear of strangers, especially cool strangers. So there was plenty of residual fear.

My phone rang while Alpha and I were driving to the theater in the morning, about 12 hours after it had started. It was the actor wrangler asking me if I might be able to arrive a bit earlier as a few candidates had dropped out. I am habitually early to everything and she was happy to hear that.

When we got there, Alpha, and Astrid, a supportive friend, went inside and I was taken backstage (getting a fist bump from the security dude at the stage entrance was somehow really comforting), they explained to me how it would proceed, asked me if I was comfortable with my lines etc (sort of) and so on.

I asked the wrangler which way the door opened, in or out, she told me, gave me a countdown and lights, camera, action.

Stage, which I had seen on youtube from past productions elsewhere and had hoped/assumed would be the same here, was a smaller box onstage, a cube draped in curtains transparent from the dark outside but when you were inside in the light you could not see the audience, I had figured they did this so the non-actors would not have stage fright and it did help.

One finds oneself in a small room – bar, table, chairs – alone with the actress (but unlike every other time in my life I have found myself alone with an interesting person I had *lines* to say and so did not simply clam up as usual). Helps to have a script, even if much of the scene was improvised.

(For example, she asks you “What are you thinking?” and you… say something. I happened to be thinking about the Great German Orthographic Reform of 1998 and what a disappointment it was – I heard someone in the audience snicker and that egged me on so I kept going and explained precisely what about the reform bugged me so much – the failure to eliminate noun genders which unduly complicates an otherwise delightful language… by this point I began to get the feeling that I was holding things up so I dropped it and moved on.)

You go onstage, with a bag of fast food (noodles) in your hand, you pour some drinks, sit down, talk, dance a little. You are in a relationship and it is not working out. She asks you to leave at the end.

Anyway. Here is the central point of this story: I go onstage. Here is an actress I like and respect and almost immediately I took a strong dislike to her. Not to who she is, but to who she is in this moment.

It was all those fucking microexpressions and her odd body language.

In the moment, I could not put my finger on it, though.

Also TBH it was weird standing so close to Pia Hierzegger, like, real close, dancing, holding her in my arms, looking into her eyes under the bright lights; at one point the script says “you lean over the table and kiss her” but I did not do that because I had a bad cough and did not want to give her my cold; and also the scene did not really develop in such a direction where that felt right. (It is bad enough that I stepped on her toe while we were dancing.) She felt so small and fragile. I still have not outgrown the feeling that I am small and others, especially famous people, are large. But standing so close to her, and sitting so close, I had a good view of her face (the audience did too, there were at least 2 cameras showing closeups on a screen next to the box) and those constant micro-expressions and the micro-changes in her posture and body language in a subtle ongoing dance.

Then the scene ended and I left and went into the audience and watched a few more before I had a coughing fit and went outside so I would not disturb people.

Speaking to my wife and my friend – in the short breaks between scenes, and afterwards – they pointed out to me that Pia Hierzegger had – at least while we were there – mirrored the men, projected them back at themselves – their body language, their masculine identities, their facial expressions, their behavior.

and I hadn’t like what I was getting, i.e. myself.

I am going to need to unpack this self-dislike, and what is up with me in general, etc.

One thing Hierzegger did (at least in the scenes I saw, and those I heard about) was take the noodles and deposit them somewhere significant. One man got them dumped into his lap. Several got them dumped onto their heads. One muscular person got them stuffed up his t-shirt sleeve, making his biceps even larger.

She balanced them on my head.

Every actor reacted differently to her and events onstage. It is an interesting parade, an interesting process. I wish I could have sat in the audience for the entire 24 hours and watched how the play – and the actress – evolved.

Alas.

Maybe I will fly to Cork.

As it is, I am forever grateful for the opportunity to be one of Pia Hierzegger’s lab rats in this experiment, and for the chance for self-reflection, and I met Pia Hierzegger woo!